All these new tools are incredible for making rapid-fire discoveries and associations, but you need a broad background of knowledge to prime you for those discoveries
this simple, but amazing fact: almost none of this--Twitter, blogs, PDFs, eBooks, Google, Findings--would have been intelligible to a writer fifteen years ago
Lovely mapping of the social development of an idea.
One of his takeaways, point 3, is essentially that one ought to be as liberally educated as possible (though he doesn't use that phrase).